Fabulous Creature (11 page)

“Well thanks,” James said. “Now that I come to think about it, it probably is one of my more creative talents.” But what he was thinking was that if the truth were told, and it wasn’t about to be, he hadn’t been listening all that carefully. What he’d been doing, along with listening just enough to make a comment now and then, was thinking about getting Diane to walk down to the road with him when he left and wondering if she would agree to a detour into the woods, again, on the way.

Not long afterwards Mrs. Jarrett called Diane to come to lunch, but when he asked her to walk as far as the road with him, she agreed. On the way down the hill he asked when he could see her again, and she suggested that they meet at the lake the next morning and go swimming together. Since she had to hurry back to lunch, their detour into the trees was very brief, but very passionate. James was still breathing hard when they got to the end of the drive and, because of the picture window, said good-by very discreetly. He was just stepping out into the road when there was a sudden roar, and he jumped back as a silver-colored Porsche rounded the curve and swept past them. A hand waved above the roof on the driver’s side, and someone yelled, “Hey, Di!”

“Lance!” Diane called. “Hi, Lance.” She waved and went on waving until the car disappeared.

“Well, good-by again, until tomorrow,” James said.

“Oh,” she said. “Good-by. You know who that was? That was Lance Richardson—in a new car. The Richardsons are back.”

“Yeah,” James said. “Your mother mentioned them. Well, I’d better be on my way. Good-by, Diane, and—” Cocking both hands he gave her favorite salute. “Ka-pow!”

Diane’s answering “Ka-pow,” seemed slightly preoccupied.

I
T WAS AN
old fantasy involving a gorgeous sexily dressed girl who practically pounced on him as he was walking innocently through a hotel lobby and by some transparent ruse or other got him to accompany her to her room where she immediately began to initiate a lot of wildly exciting activities—the kind of thing that apparently happened to Max quite frequently but that James, himself, had only read and fantasized about. The difference was that recently the fantasy girl had had a recognizable face. A sleek tan face with reckless gold-brown eyes and a kiss-shaped mouth.

He sighed and threw back his blanket so that only a sheet protected him from the fresh morning air. It seemed warmer than usual. He closed his eyes again and let himself sink back into reverie and once again conjured up her face. Diane was undoubtedly—and unexaggeratedly, in spite of what Max had implied in his last letter—the sexiest girl James had ever seen. Beside her, Trudi Hepplewhite faded into drab obscurity. He sighed again as the fantasy face rolled its beautiful eyes and curled its perfect lips in a familiar smile—a smile that simultaneously teased, challenged and invited.

“—and beyond appearance?”

Unexpected and unsolicited, the question appeared below the fantasy face like a subtitle in a foreign movie. But not out of the blue. It had been asked before—just the night before, in fact, by Charlotte, in the midst of a discussion concerning what James had been doing with his time lately. He had considered telling Charlotte before, and this time when she asked, he had suddenly said, “I’ve been falling in love.”

“Oh, really? I somehow had a feeling something of the sort was involved. Tell me about her.”

They had been sitting on the veranda at the time—just James and his mother—watching an enormous full moon float up over the eastern ridge of mountains, sending a golden trail across the black waters of the lake. The moonlight was bright enough for him to tell that she was looking at him with curiosity and with what seemed to be approval, which was just about the reaction he’d anticipated. Charlotte had always been very interested in emotions. When James was little, she was always asking him how he felt about things and telling him that it was important for people to stay in touch with their feelings. Once, when he’d asked her if his father was in touch with his feelings, she’d smiled in a funny way and said, “You know, I used to wonder about that, too. But then I discovered that your father has a perfectly normal quota of emotions. It’s just that in his case they have a lot of intellectual activity to compete with. Actually, his emotions behave quite normally once you get their attention.”

Having become accustomed to discussions of that sort, James felt free to bring up all kinds of topics—topics some people might consider unsuitable where parents were concerned. For instance, he’d mentioned more than once his feeling of inadequacy with girls and Charlotte had listened without making any of the useless comments you might expect from a person her age—Such as not to worry because it was only a phase he would be growing out of as he got older. She’d seemed to understand how frustrated he was about it, so he felt certain she’d be pleased to hear how things had changed since he’d met Diane.

He started at the beginning, telling her how they’d met and how easy Diane was to talk to. Apparently he’d also said a quite a lot about the way she looked because when he finally ran down, Charlotte had said, “—and beyond appearance?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I just mean I’d like to know about her as a person. The kinds of things she’s interested in—likes—dislikes, the things you have in common, perhaps.”

So he’d mentioned that Diane played tennis and a little about her swimming and diving. He didn’t go into the hunting thing, knowing how Charlotte felt about the subject. Then he’d thought for a while and added, “And another thing we have in common is”—he paused and grinned to make clear that he wasn’t entirely serious—“Me!” Charlotte’s reaction made him feel that it wasn’t necessary to explain any further—to go into what a surprise it had been to find that someone like Diane was interested in him. He didn’t go into the chemistry thing either—about how he reacted physically to Diane and how she apparently reacted to him.

Shifting over onto his back, he put his arm behind his head and went on thinking about the things he and Diane had in common. After a while he decided it didn’t really matter, anyway. That is, it didn’t mean that they couldn’t have a significant and important relationship. Look at all the love affairs in literature where the lovers had very little in common. After some thought he came up with Phillip and Mildred in
Of Human Bondage
and David Copperfield and Dora, which might not have been what you’d call ideal matches, but certainly would have to be called significant. And besides, there was lots of time in which they might develop interests in common: Something might start developing at any time—a thought that led to the time at the moment—and the fact that he had an eleven o’clock date to meet Diane at the lake.

He reached the spot they agreed on, a stretch of lakeshore near the first boathouse, a little early and stretched out to work on his tan while he waited. The breeze was cool, but the clean, sharp warmth of the mountain sun tingled the skin of his back and legs. The air smelled damply of sand and lake, spiced now and then by breezes laden with the sun-warmed scent of pine and fir. All of it, the smells, the sensuous comfort of sun and sand, the anticipation of Diane’s arrival, blended into a strangely vivid feeling of timelessness, a sense that this moment was everlasting, would go on existing, returning again and again, like sunrise or the first day of spring. The shining moment dimmed and lengthened, drifted into semi-consciousness and then back into an awareness of a numb arm and a back that was a little too warm for comfort. He sat up and looked at his watch. It was almost twelve o’clock.

When he dialed the Jarrett’s number from the snack bar phone booth, Diane answered the phone. “Oh hi,” she said. “Wait a minute. I’m going to another phone.” There was a slight thump and then nothing except the distant sound of several people talking and laughing. Then someone shouted, No, Jacky. Don’t—” a click and the line was dead.

James stared into the earpiece. “I don’t believe it,” he said. Fishing in the pocket of his trunks, he discovered he was out of dimes. After Fiona had torn herself away from a conversation with a muscle-bound guy in green coveralls who was restocking the ice cream freezer, she finally changed his quarter and he got back to the phone booth. This time the phone rang quite a while before Diane answered it.

“Hi Jamesy,” she said. “I’m sorry. Jacky hung up on us.”

“So I gathered. I just called to ask if you were coming to the lake, like we planned.”

“The lake? Oh, did we say we’d meet there for sure? I thought you just said you’d call to see if I could come down.”

He decided against saying how sure he was they’d made it definite. “Well. I’m calling,” he said instead. “Are you coming down?”

There was a long pause. “I’m afraid I can’t right now. We have company. Friends of the family. My mother wouldn’t want me to leave right now.”

There was a silence while James tried to deal with his anger.

“I’m sorry, Jamesy,” Diane said. Her voice was soft, seductive, pleading. “Don’t be mad at me. Maybe we can go swimming tomorrow. Okay?”

He said he wasn’t mad at her. When the conversation was over, he went on sitting in the phone booth for several minutes, glumly considering the possibilities for the rest of the day. He would just as soon have gone on home, except that he had told Charlotte about his date to go swimming with Diane and he didn’t feel like going into explanations right at the moment. Finally he decided rather bitterly to go back to the beach and, in the interest of symmetry, sunburn his stomach to match his back. After ordering an egg sandwich at the sidewalk window, he trudged back across the sand.

The egg salad sandwich turned out to be made of a little lettuce and a lot of goopy mayonnaise and a few small lumps that you could believe were hard-boiled egg, if you felt optimistic, but which in his present state of mind he was inclined to view with suspicion. Closing his eyes and making a determined effort to think positively, he finished the sandwich and collapsed in the sand. The air had lost its cool tingle, and the sand felt hot and itchy. Eyes closed tightly and teeth clenched, he had been determinedly tanning for about ten minutes when someone said, “Hello Prince.” Sitting up, he looked quickly around. There was no one on the beach except himself.

“Hello,” the voice said again, and following the sound, he looked up at the dock of the nearest boathouse. Griffin Donahue was leaning over the rail looking down at him. Her long braid of sunstreaked hair, dangling two feet below her face, looked almost as wide as her neck, and tight-fitting blue jeans accentuated the narrow length of her body. Seen from below, her wide long-eyed face looked vaguely oriental.

“Oh it’s you,” he said. “What are you doing up there?”

“Feeding things.”

“Yeah? What kind of things?” He grinned, raising his eyebrows in mock apprehension. “Or should I ask?”

She didn’t smile. “Do you want to see?” she asked.

“Sure. Why not?”

The dock was well posted with
Keep Off
and
Private Property
signs, and a padlocked chain blocked access by unauthorized vehicles. As he stepped over the chain, James noticed the wooden sign that hung from it. The name
Westmoreland
was carved into the wood in artistically rustic script, and the boathouse itself, one of the largest on the lake, followed The Camp’s architectural guidelines—a style that James had recently, in a letter to Max, dubbed “Ghost Town Lavish.” He followed Griffin past the crossbarred double doors of the main entrance and around to the side of the building. At a small side entrance she stopped and took a key from her pocket. Picking up a paper bag, which had been sitting near the door, she looked back at James and said, “Shh. Come in very quietly.”

The light was dim. Just below floor level a large cabin-type motor boat rocked gently, its polished chrome and shiny enamel reflecting the soft light. At dock level a narrow strip of walkway ran around three sides of the boathouse and a block and tackle arrangement dangled from the ceiling beams. Near the double doors a spiral wrought iron stairway led to an upper floor. Griffin closed the small door behind them very softly, and the light became even dimmer.

“Shh,” she said again. Motioning for James to follow her, she led the way to a coil of rope near the outer edge of the walkway. “Sit down,” she whispered. She waited until he was seated on the rope and then knelt and crawled to where a flight of steps led down to the deck of the boat. Leaning forward, she rapped sharply with her knuckles on the top stair.

James found himself staring with unblinking fascination, expecting—almost anything. His eyes still weren’t completely adjusted to the dim light, and now, as Griffin leaned into the flickering light reflecting up from the rippling water, the outlines of her bent back and reaching arms wavered and swam, transforming themselves into slender swaying patterns. He was still staring when a scrabbling noise caught his attention, and following the sound, he looked down in time to see a small black hand appear on the edge of the second stair. He caught his breath in an involuntary gasp of astonishment. The hand disappeared.

Griffin looked back, frowning, and her lips noiselessly formed a “shh.” Then she rapped on the step again. The black hand reappeared, followed by a second one and then a long slender black nose. A small masked face twisted to look up at her, and then a raccoon crawled out onto the step from a narrow space between the dock and the boathouse floor. Whispering something under her breath, she pulled the paper bag slowly towards her and took out a handful of kibbled dog food. As she slowly extended her hand, the raccoon raised a handlike paw and took a few morsels from her palm. When it had eaten the first mouthful, Griffin moved back and he followed, climbing up onto the floor of the boathouse. A moment later a second raccoon appeared on the stair, and then a third.

They were aware of James. Their dainty black noses twitched in his direction and their eyes and ears scanned him anxiously from time to time; but then returning to Griffin, they seemed to dismiss him as something of hers; as something potentially dangerous but made safe and acceptable by her presence. Crouching on the coil of rope, James watched in almost breathless fascination as Griffin went on feeding and talking to the animals. He couldn’t hear what she was saying. In fact, at times it hardly seemed to be words at all; but her lips moved, and he could make out a soft stream of sound. The raccoons circled in front of her, small furry hunchbacked shapes, bobbing their heads and making soft growling noises. One at a time they came closer, squatted on their haunches, held out both hands, or reached out to touch her bent knees. As each one approached, she seemed to speak to it individually, and each of them responded, looking up at her face and making the soft, throaty noises. When she held out handfuls of kibble, they sat up and reached for it with both hands, scooping it up gently between their palms. When the food was gone, they went on weaving and bobbing around her, touching her feet and legs, exploring the empty bag, scurrying away when their explorations brought them too close to where James was sitting. After a long time she stood up, and as if at a signal, the raccoons filed down the stairs and disappeared beneath the flooring. Back in the bright sunlight on the dock, the spell faded slowly. Griffin seemed distant, almost distracted. Walking beside her, James watched her curiously.