Flagged Victor (8 page)

Let’s row over and get them, I said.

But Chris refused.

Come on.

No.

Come on!

Forget it.

Why not?

Are you kidding me?

I was not, in any sense, trying to kid him, and I wished he would stop kidding me.

It wasn’t in my nature to be wilful or impulsive, but I felt half-crazed with desire. Stepping into the boat with ungainly haste, I picked up the ends of each oar and asked Chris, one
last time, whether he was going to join me. He laughed again. I suppose if I was a member of Ulysses’s crew, I would have been among the first to head for the Sirens.

It took ten minutes to cross the lake. I felt more humiliated and yet more hopeful with each inch of progress. I didn’t dare to check too frequently over my shoulder, even though I feared the girls would flee before I arrived. Rowing evenly and steadily to the other shore, I kept myself skilfully on course by locking my eyes to the floating dock, where Chris was suntanning.

When I reached land, I saw with relief that the girls were still waiting for me, and I couldn’t quite believe my good fortune. They seemed amused and pleased by my gallant gesture of having crossed an ocean to meet them. And they were indescribably beautiful. Lithe and barely dressed in the smallest of bikinis, they were perfectly tanned—tanned on their feet, on their toes, on the tops of their ears—without any variation of colour, an essence poured into the glass vessel of girlhood, contained in there without any spilling, the caramel of youth and endless summer. Both were thin. One was taller, with red frizzy hair, and cartoonish brown freckles on her cheeks, and jaw-droppingly rounded breasts. She seemed, despite her size and robust sexuality, the more innocent, cheerful, and therefore stupid of the two. The other was shorter, flatter chested though prominently nippled, with dark brown, almost raven-black hair, large dark sunglasses, a thin gold necklace, and a sarcastic and mocking line to her mouth, the kind of knowing humour that has always indicated intelligence and the excitement of danger to me.

Nice boat, she said, and I knew she was making fun.

Can you drive all of us in that at once? the other asked.

I marvelled at the distinct but delicious differences between them. Although I naturally preferred the dark-haired disdainful one, I could imagine either of their breasts held in my hands and sucked by my mouth and knew I could finger-fuck each without prejudice, or both at the same time, and enjoy the variant qualities of slip and sticky, the change in pungency. I practically fainted with curiosity and need.

At the same time, I was also efficient and competent. I managed to get them both on board—the initial victory of any pervert—and huddled up on the far seat before heaving the boat away from shore. It was awkward and slow to row the three of us back. But I was astonished, with each pull, to look up and see two bikini-wearing girls across from me. They had their towels bunched on their laps, but their toes were near mine, and their hands dangled in the water, and they laughed like sparkling beads of light whenever I said something funny. Their names were Leah and Susan. Leah was the taller of the two, the older and possibly stupid one, the one blissfully at ease. She’d graduated in the spring from the other high school and had, it seemed, no plans to ever go back to school again. Susan was from my high school, though I did not recognize her without clothes on. Despite being a year or two younger than me, she had the composed and intimidating aura of a fully mature woman.

Chris perked up by the time we arrived, peeving me and making me feel proud at the same time. He helped hold the boat tight to the floating dock while the girls deboarded.

Now what? Leah said, with her hands on her hips, and a tilt to her head.

I could think of so many unmentionable ideas, but we went swimming instead. We dove or cannonballed into the water. We splashed each other. We raced out, turned around, treaded close to one another, dove under, grabbed a foot, kicked away. We laughed and tickled. (I feared rising from the water because I didn’t know whether my erection was fully formed and steel-rod stiff, or just bobbing playfully.) We did handstands and back-flipped into the water. The girls, with their lean, proportionately exquisite bodies, could do them perfectly, and somehow I knew they would never be so beautiful again. Chris could also manage a handstand, rising like a great redwood, the muscles on his shoulders and back straining formidably before he tottered and crashed into the water. My own attempts were typically pathetic. I wobbled, collapsed, and landed on my neck on the floating dock, before tumbling in agony into the water. Chris laughed mercilessly. The girls laughed, though they were also suitably concerned. I showed enjoyment in my buffoonery, but I could already feel a stiffness setting into my neck and knew I’d barely be able to turn my head the next day.

When
we got cold, we swam to the pier onshore and lay face down on the warm planks, smelling the sunshine soaked into the splintery wood. We watched through the cracks for minnows swimming by. I noticed that Leah’s foot was almost touching Chris’s leg and that he had raised himself on his elbows in such a way that his shoulders looked even more rounded, like a powerful animal’s haunches before a sudden forward spring. Some sense of pheromones became obvious to us all, and Susan
mentioned that she needed to pee. Then, to my amazement, she asked me to accompany her.

I jumped to my feet and glanced at Chris as I left. We laughed silently to each other, barely capable of disguising our delight. This was the summer experience we’d always longed for and imagined. The spontaneous double fuck.

I followed Susan’s small steps along the mossy path.

I always wondered what was on this side of the lake, she said.

I asked her if she lived on the other side. She told me that she did now. The houses were more expensive over there, and she seemed like someone with money. I was trembling as though cold and I couldn’t trust my own voice.

Wait here, she told me, and disappeared into the woods.

I knew that she was peeing. I knew that, somewhere, she was crouching and her bikini bottoms were around her knees and urine was leaving her vagina and puddling the earth between her tanned feet.

There was a boulder nearby, set partly in the water. It made a good spot to cast from because you could span out beyond the weeds. I clambered up and sat down. The surface was hotter than I expected, and I winced and forced myself to get used to it. I waited. I suppose I would have waited forever.

When she returned, I was calmer, almost resigned, as if our relationship had progressed further in the interim, become something more intimate and knowing. She climbed up beside me and sat close. My arm touched her arm. My feet dangled near her feet. I pushed the side of her foot with my toes, she kicked back playfully. A frog jumped. So we hadn’t killed them all, I thought.

Leah’s weird, she said.

What do you mean? I asked. I did not want to talk about Leah. I wanted to nuzzle Susan’s neck and nibble the lobe of her ear.

I thought it was weird to call you over. Don’t you think it was weird?

I shrugged. I guess, I said. Yes, it was weird, but I was glad.

I’ve seen you in school, she said.

Have you? I asked, heart thumping.

You’re very noticeable.

I gulped. Is that so? I wanted to ask why, to gain some insight.

How come you don’t have a girlfriend? she asked before I could pursue my line of thought.

I was taken aback, did not know whether this was criticism or invitation, and I tried to recover with something cool and confrontational.

How do you know I don’t?

She looked at me strangely. You’re sitting with me like this for one thing.

I had no answer for that. Even if I had a girlfriend, the situation seemed innocent or at least plausibly defensible (which was the same thing in my moral universe). Were my intentions so obvious?

How about you? I asked. Why no boyfriend?

She took a shard of rock and threw it into the water.

You don’t ask a girl something like that.

And I thought, Jesus, which way am I supposed to turn here?

We sat silently. And then I did something I’d never done before while sober, and rarely since. I moved toward her. She did
not move away. We leaned into each other. Our foreheads met and rested one against the other. Her mouth opened slightly. Her warm breath smelled like blueberries. I could see the lashes of her eyes. This is it, I thought, this is the one I will always be with. I had the sense that I knew her, that I always had, and though our spirits did not jostle easily, they were already entangled and always would be. We complicated each other. We were puzzles and accusations both. All of this in the time it takes to remember to breathe. My lips touched her lips and her tongue bumped quickly into mine, like a fish darting through water, and I felt a peculiar emotion, part anxiety and part ease, about the depths I knew I could never fully explore.

We’ve been gone a long time, she whispered, after mere minutes of this.

She made me feel, in that moment, as though we’d been cheating. My hand was on her chest, just above her breast, my thumb was edging her nipple, my fingers clinging to her collarbone. Her hand gripped my other wrist tightly, as if holding onto me for balance or keeping me from reaching down into her bikini bottoms.

I waited. I did not dare to speak.

She put a finger on my chin and pushed until I looked up.

You, she said, are strange and dark inside. I think you’re trouble. And I think you’re very smart.

I did not know what to say, or how to express my astonishment at this oracular pronouncement. What did it even mean? She’s only sixteen, I reminded myself, as if to dilute the message. But I felt as though she knew me better than anyone had ever known me before.

Such soft skin, such a warm mouth. I felt tenderly toward her, like a killer does. I moved in again, this time with more hunger.

Take me back, you big brute, she said, and gave me the kind of smile you cannot argue against, so bright and sudden it made me realize all her smiles before had been guarded. Perhaps it was the only kind of smile that could break the spell and allow me to release her. So I raised myself from the rock and hopped to the ground with longing lodged painfully in my throat, and I gallantly offered to lift her down as though she were a figure skater in the air. I felt her full weight in my arms, and I placed her neatly before me. She laughed and gave me a quick and furtive hug around the waist.

Come on, you, she said.

We’d walked a fair ways, and she seemed to have more trouble with the pine needles and sharp sticks on the way back. As we neared the pier, I heard a strange squeak, and an odd laugh, and I feared we might be interrupting something. But Susan either didn’t hear those noises at all or was too focused on her footing to understand what they meant. It was only when we came to the clearing that we saw what was happening.

They were stretched out along the length of the pier and half-wrapped in a towel, but it was impossible not to know what they were doing. I saw his legs and bare back, and her knees and arched feet locked around his hips, and the long, smooth skin of her extended throat and, I swear, the animal flaring of her nostrils. A rude growl came from her. It seemed to start in her belly and uncoil through her torso and tremble as it left her parted mouth. Her hands gripped his hair and held his head down, and
a fluid speed possessed his whole body even as his toes searched for grip between the planks.

Can you get my towel please, Susan asked me.

I didn’t understand, and I couldn’t move. I was too distraught and amazed. I felt betrayed and in awe, horribly alone, tearful, viciously envious, and fiercely proud.

Can you please get my towel, she repeated.

Susan’s head was hanging down, her hair like a half-curtain around her face. Her mouth was stern and angry, and I thought I could see tears of rage forming in her eyes. I did not know how to respond but to step gently onto the pier and approach them. Leah’s eyes were closed tightly shut. Her feet were planted on the wood now, her knees still clenched on Chris’s hips. I could sense Chris’s irritation and read his glare through the back of his skull.

I just need to, I said. This, I added. And I pulled and tugged and removed the bundled towel from under her back. And then I turned and fled.

No boat this time. We walked. I accompanied Susan all the way around the lake to where I’d picked them up. We did not speak much. I shook my head a few times and tried to say now I understood what she’d meant about Leah being weird. Susan barely seemed to hear, except once she announced, Leah doesn’t have a father, you know, as if this odd and somehow surprising psychological detail explained something about what had happened. When we made it to their side, she retrieved her sandals and a bottle of baby oil and left me with only a disinterested wave. No kiss. No hug. I hated her a little. I did not feel like walking all the way around the lake again. I walked into the water
instead and angled my course for the distant swampy corner, away from where Chris and Leah and the dock and my rubber dinghy remained. I set off. It took a long time to get across, and there were a few moments when I wondered if I might drown, but I didn’t really care. When I neared the marshes, the weeds started clinging to my limbs and the water around me got cloudy and tasted brackish in my mouth. I swam until it became too shallow and then I tried to stand and sank through the peat without finding any footing and mucked my way desperately to shore, falling repeatedly.

For
the rest of the summer and into the fall, as my first year of college started, Leah became part of our lives while Susan was as absent as a shooting star. It was difficult to resent Leah, she was so light and good-natured, even as I was distracted by the memory of her bare legs stretching skyward, her pink nipples, her elongated throat, and the wish that I’d experienced something like that with Susan, on the mossy forest floor, under the cloak of the trees, dappled by the sun. Chris and I attended the same school again, for the third time. Chris was a biology major with a minor in sociology. He had in mind a master’s degree in criminology, believing that such a path would move him up the pay scale faster when he became a police officer. I was an English major. We often met for lunch in the Student Union Building. He, thank God, was showing me the ropes. Where to eat. Where to drink. How to cut between buildings to avoid going outside as much as possible. One or two days a week, Leah joined us on our lunch break, dressed in business clothes from whatever
receptionist job she was temping. I associated her menial work and the heavy earrings she wore with a lower-class upbringing. She looked older, more composed, less wonderfully at ease than in her bikini, but friendly. It seemed, amazingly enough, that we were her closest, or even only, friends. Although I resented her, I could find nothing specific to complain about, and enjoyed her company. She wasn’t, it turned out, stupid at all. She did not seem to know much about university studies, but while she was not unduly impressed by our status as students, she was interested in our courses. She noticed one day a philosophy book I had in my stack and asked to see it, flipping the pages and reading the full foreword while Chris and I ate. Where do you get this kind of stuff? she asked. Somewhat patronizingly, I told her about the campus bookstore but said the prices were quite high. There were other cheaper second-hand stores around the neighbourhood. She nodded and the three of us talked about other things, and then it was time for me to go to my next class and time for Leah and Chris to go back to a friend’s dorm room and fuck. Chris had expertly scheduled all of his classes to be over by noon, in time for a quick lunch and some midday sex. Mine were clumsily strung along all day. Another stark difference between us.